Many of us would have used cheat codes at some point in our lives while playing a PC game. I was just wondering how does that work?
Edit: Adding onto this, do trainers work the same way?
In: Technology
Cheat codes were included in most games as testing tools, making it easy for developers to test game functions without being bothered by game mechanics (invincible, unlimited money, unlock all), because testing the game also means compiling it first, and that takes ages.
Compiling the game including cheat codes allowed developers to test things out while also hiding the codes (they need to make it hard to activate cheats by mistake, because cheat codes are meant to stay in the game even after release).
Nowadays developers have the option to compile the game with or without console access, and from there they can temporarily create their own cheats, by inputting console commands, while keeping the console inaccessible for the final release.
Some games like GTA 5 still include classic cheat codes, not for testing purposes, but as common secrets.
They’re specifically programmed into the game by the developers. From a functionality standpoint, there’s no difference between a feature that says “Click the right mouse button for infinite lives” and “press this sequence of keys on your keyboard to get infinite lives”.
They’re intentionally put in by the developers, often for testing purposes. Sometimes, they leave them in, and players find out in some way. As for how cheat codes do what they do, they just send commands to the game to change particular variables (like the time of day, the player’s money, etc) or spawn objects into the world.
There’s a few kinds of cheat codes.
Some are just functions programmed into the game by the developers, either as a fun little trick or as a development tool to help them skip levels or beat bosses during play testing.
Others (like the old Game Shark) are external, and modify the code or the save files to produce results outside of the original developer’s design.
Regular cheatcodes are built in by the designers of the game. They exist as a gimmick.
Some cheats also trick the game from the outside by overwritting certain parts of the memory, or stuff like aimbots actually read information from the game and send fake mouse signals back in.
Im gonna use gta 4 as an example. They are coded special sequences that if pressed in the right order and in a certain time something happens. It’s kind of like self hacking.
They started out as development codes.
Let’s say you are developing a shooting game. You need to test out the Ultra Gun. The Ultra Gun appears in the last level of the game, which requires 6 hours of play. Your boss doesn’t want you wasting 6 hours of your 8 hour shift getting the gun so you can test it. So you code in a button combination that gives you all the guns right away.
Now your boss wants you to test a reported glitch where dying in level 9 causes you to freeze the game. You don’t want to spend an hour getting to level 9, and you don’t want the game to reset after you’ve tested dying 3 times. So you enter the cheat code to warp to level 9 and the code to give you infinite lives so you can die repeatedly in level 9 looking for the glitch.
And so on.
Eventually, gamers started finding these codes left in the game and started using them. Game designers realized that such “cheat codes” were a desirable feature, so they started intentionally including them in games for players to find.
The creators of video games set the rules of the game. It has become a tradition that many game designers build cheat codes into the game that alter the regular rules. These codes only exist because the programmers added them intentionally.
There are other kinds of cheats that people add to games by “hacking” into the game and changing the data in the computer memory resulting in different behaviors for the game. These cheats were not added by the game developers. A good example of this kind of cheating method is the “Game Genie” devices which were available for Nintendo and other video game consoles. The game genie cartridge allowed you to change data being communicated between the game cartridge and the game system, and the codes you entered were instructions to the game genie on what data to change. Useful codes were figured out and distributed by the makers of the game genie, or by enterprising gamers doing their own testing.
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